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‘You’ve Got To Be Bold’ – Why Moving to Virtual Events for All of 2020 Is Turning Into a Win for PRWeek

by Media

The hope that live events will return in the fall is increasingly giving way to the realization that many (if not most) conferences and trade shows in the U.S. will continue to be virtual or hybrids of online and in-person for the remainder of 2020. Last week, Informa saw an 8% stock jump when it said select trade shows would resume in Asia but warned that live events in the U.S. won’t return until at least September.

On June 3, Haymarket Media’s PRWeek became one of the first B2B media brands to announce that its full slate of events—including conferences and awards programs—will go virtual for the remainder of the year. Soon after, another Haymarket brand, Medical Marketing & Media, announced it will also be taking the remainder of its 2020 events virtual.

I caught up with Steve Barrett, Vice President and Editorial Director of PRWeek, on making the call, how virtual events are opening up new audiences and how the PRWeek edit team is rising to the challenge by creating new types of content that break the mold of traditional B2B.

On making the decision to go virtual for the remainder of the year…

Steve Barrett: The start of the lockdown came at bad time for everyone but particularly for us because we had our biggest event of year, the PRWeek Awards, set for March 19 in New York City, where we get over 1,000 PR pros in a room at Cipriani.

You’ve got to be bold in business. We had to make a difficult call then and we’ve been making difficult decisions about events since then. We’ve got awards shows, conferences, honorifics like our Hall of Fame, which honors women in PR, our Brand Film Festival at the Paley Center for Media and our Global Awards program that usually takes place in London.

At the end of the day, after taking all the guidance of our stakeholders into account and thinking about safety, which is the most important thing, and whether there’s really an appetite to travel and get together in large groups, we decided for clarity, for safety and so everyone can plan for rest of year, to call it and go virtual.

How virtual events give PRWeek new scale…

Whilst it’s regrettable that we can’t meet in person, there’s a lot of things that you can do like widening it out to a larger audience.

Our Global Awards are normally held in London. We made it a three-part event and optimized each day for a different part of the world—one day for Europe, one day for Asia, one day for the U.S.

At a physical event, nobody wants to sit there and watch loads of content—they want to network, they want to go to parties and obviously, we want to encourage that. In a virtual environment, they are more apt to focus on the content.

Our smaller Convene events usually run over lunch and we do three or four 30 to 40-minute discussions. We had one on COVID-19 and communicating in the coronavirus era and three thousand people registered. Normally, an event like that would get 80 to 90 people in a room.

When we come back to live events, virtual elements will still be part of that going forward. We’ve seen the potential of it.

On redefining content in the COVID-19 era…

We’ve added a lot of new elements to our weekly content. Lockdown Life features profiles of people in their work-at-home situations and includes fun videos where we get kids to say what they think their parents do for a living. We’ve talked to people in the industry who had the virus and what that experience was like; we had one where we featured two people working from home at competing PR firms.

There’s been a lot of bad news this summer so we’ve tried to balance that with some fun and engaging content. We launched Coffee Break, which are just short, 15-minutes videos like we’re doing here, with people in the industry.

At Haymarket Media we’ve got 40 brands across the world and we launched a coronavirus briefing with content from all those brands. Whereas B2B is about going deep in a vertical, this was a horizontal slice on one topic. That was really interesting—I could see that happening on other issues like the future of work or diversity.

Necessity is the mother of invention and editorial teams have been doing this for 10, 15 years now. We’ve had to be scrappy; we’ve had to pivot. We’ve had to work through challenges before like the financial crisis. I sometimes think consumer media is only just catching up to us. We’re battle-worn, we’re battle-weary, but we’ve still got a lot of energy and we’re still full of great ideas and I think there’s some great content being produced in the B2B environment.

 

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‘New Incentives… for a Subscription’; Maybe Time Has Come for Timewalls

by Media
So I have 8 hours, 26 minutes and 5, 4, 3, 2—oh, you get the picture—seconds to tell you about this article I read today on the International News Media Association website before it locks, and I can’t access it unless I become a member.
From an article on Twipe, I learned that this is called a timewall—sounds a little science fictiony—and it’s proving to be pretty successful for acquiring new paid subscribers.
“In Germany, [the media group] Madsack launched a timewall in mid-2019 that allows new content to be free for the first hour, then it goes behind the paywall. With a goal of 25k new subscriptions with this strategy in the first 18 months, after just six months they were already halfway to their goal,” writes Mary-Katharine Phillips.
Added Bernhard Bahners, chief digital officer at Madsack: “The timewall offers readers new incentives to opt for a subscription faster and more often, for example compared to conventional paid content models.”
The thought process behind this is that readers are incentivized to visit the website often so as not to miss an article—kind of like when tickets used to go on sale for a big concert or musical. (Remember those days—now I just keep getting money back for cancelled events I had tickets for.) “This has helped to gamify the user experience” which we all enjoy, writes Phillips, “and drive increased frequency, which is key for retention.”
Apparently, clicks on all articles are going up in that first free hour since people are on the site anyway.
At BoiseDev, a mico-news site in Idaho, paying members receive local news stories in a newsletter, which are then published on the website the day after. So I just tried to click on an article and got this: “Unlock member stories FIRST. Cancel anytime. Membership in BoiseDev makes these exclusive stories possible, and gives you access to stories before anyone else.”
“The timewall approach allows for members of our business-focused content to get a tangible perk while keeping the paywall down,” said Don Day, publisher of BoiseDev. Apparently, they’ve made tens of thousands of dollars in reader revenue, and everyone still gets to read it. Day first wrote about this in December 2018 in NiemanLab’s excellent Predictions for Journalism.
MittMedia in Sweden and INMA—the one where the clock is running down on me—both take the free-first approach. They put the articles out there—MittMedia for just an hour and INMA for a day—and then show visitors a countdown clock with your remaining time. Who doesn’t love that?
After the hour or day is up, the article becomes premium content, accessible only with a paid subscription. Phillips wrote that MittMedia has increased subscriber conversions by 20%. The strategy makes sense. Last week I found an INMA article I really liked but then got busy. So when I wanted to access information from it the next day, it was available only to members. Whereas if I never get to read an article, I won’t know its merits.
Apparently, it took MittMedia just two weeks to build and launch the timewall.
Delia Cai, growth and trends editor at BuzzFeed, wrote briefly about timewalls in 2019—specifically the INMA and MittMedia model. “It’s an interesting way to think about the lifespan of an article, and how the value of a post isn’t always highest when it’s freshest—which, of course, is pretty crazy to wrap your head around when it feels like being first is the only thing that matters in this biz.”
Amazingly, she also brought up what publishers do in a crisis! “Plus, a timewall also preserves a democratic element of journalism that often sits uneasily with more tightly walled-up sites, especially in times of crisis (i.e., why the NYT will disable their paywall during Hurricane Harvey coverage), and that’s pretty cool. So what we’re saying is, maybe there’s still a chance that newspapers can keep the general public informed and make money, too?”
I have just six hours, 44 minutes and 15 seconds left. Time to go!
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‘Are You Leaving Money on the Table?’ Hybrid Events Are Probably the Future.

by Media
I was watching an admittedly bad—but happy—TV movie the other night, and the ending focused on an in-person event where a contest winner would be announced for building the nicer house. A woman stepped to the podium: “I want to welcome everyone here tonight, and also all the wonderful people in our community watching at home who couldn’t make it.”
It makes sense, but of course, it’s anything but revolutionary. We’ve been hearing awards show hosts saying that for years—although lately there have been no hosts. But you haven’t really seen that introduction given at most pre-pandemic business conferences. However, certain segments, like the gaming industry, have found new ways to blend live and virtual experiences, spotlighting emerging trends such as the best non GamStop casinos 2025 during dedicated conference sessions. The thinking has usually been that by offering the conference virtually, you would encourage people not to come. Maybe let them buy some recorded sessions later.
Even when in-person events do return—and at some point they will; safety guidelines were being issued today—virtual will remain part of the mix.
“There are people in your community who will never come to an event but would benefit greatly from it,” Brian Cuthbert, group vice president, Diversified Communications U.S., told me this week. “Are you leaving money on the table by not giving that segment of audience an opportunity to become a customer and spend some money with you?”
In an article in Industry Dive’s Marketing Dive this week, “respondents were asked about the types of events they expect to see in the future with:
  • 62% predicting to see global virtual events with live video feeds from headlining speakers;
  • 59% think virtual events tailored to defined groups of experts and specialists will emerge;
  • 51% expect global virtual gatherings of national and regional experts to foster those communities; and
  • 47% think member-only virtual networking events designed to connect businesses with prospects will emerge.”
More events may actually turn “hybrid,” especially as Cuthbert explained, when learning is the biggest goal. “For conferences and training, where the hook is around learning and education, hybrid has more legs than other formats,” Cuthbert said, adding that “really good content” can be delivered in many ways. But when networking and delivering an experience are paramount, it will be tough to replicate in-person, he added.
“If it’s virtual only, what are you doing to make [participants] feel part of the community?” Cuthbert asked. “People want to learn from others also. [This crisis] can be very isolating. We’re not in the office, we’re not connecting face to face. And are people going to pay [virtually]? Is it just about sessions or is it about networking?” He mentioned the chat and discussion rooms that some platforms provide, but admitted that’s “never going to replace the in-person element.”
An article today on Event Manager Blog suggested that producers of future in-person events may have to come up with a new marketing strategy.
“Remember that time you used to check your social media feed and you spotted that event you really wanted to attend?” the author asked. “Remember the frustration you experienced because, for whatever reason, you could not attend? FOMO, or the ‘fear of missing out,’ was the origin of your frustration.
“Event marketers jumped at the opportunity to make you feel that discomfort. Happy faces of attendees having fun while you were stuck at home—or worse, at work… What nobody expected was the rise of virtual events. All of a sudden, we could attend dozens of events from the comfort of our living room. To top it off, these events were in most cases free to attend.
“A dream come true for attendees, or a nightmare for an industry in pain.”
Cuthbert also asked about pricing? For hybrid events, that’s mostly going to be trial and error. Should it cost less for people to attend virtually? But will that again be encouraging them to stay home—literally. Another advantage of the hybrid model, at least for the foreseeable future, is that it will be easier to pivot. In other words, committing to strictly in-person for, say, December or January, is still tricky. But add a virtual component, and then that could be easily extended. A foundation would be in place.
“That’s where we are,” said Cuthbert, who has not fully designed a hybrid event yet.
We’re all looking to see what components work well so we can piece together the best experience possible—in-person, virtually, hybrid, or, at the least, in a bad TV movie.
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‘Understand What You Do Well’; Keeping Your Audience Post-COVID

by COVID 19Media
In my previous post, Stephanie Williford of EB Medicine spoke about the tremendous engagement they’ve been getting since they started posting COVID-19 resources. One article in particular has garnered 340,000 views when a typical, popular article used to get 10,000.
Of course, EB Medicine is not alone. Many publishers and associations have seen big jumps in their visitors and clicks due to coronavirus coverage and resource sites they’ve developed. The challenge for most will be keeping that engagement—and hopefully in many cases subscriptions—after the crisis has abated or in a year from now for renewals.
Here are some ideas:
Examine previous spikes and identify the readers who stayed and who left. That comes from Robbie Kelman Baxter, author of The Forever Transaction and a past SIPA keynote speaker, in an article on the What’s New in Publishing site. Can you tell why they might have stayed or perhaps what their engagement has been since? “It’s never been more important to understand what you do well and why people come to you, from an editorial and a revenue perspective,” said Mia Lehmkuhl Libby, CRO, The Daily Beast, in that same article.
Make your news and information continue to be relevant, said Jeremy Gilbert, director of strategic initiatives for The Washington Post. “Make people aware… about the width and breadth of coverage that you can do.” Which leads to…
Promote non-coronavirus stories to your new visitors/subscribers. The Guardian in the UK is sharing a list of 10 of its most-well read non-coronavirus articles every day. At the Post, Gilbert said that they are “trying to show that our arts writers and critics, our sports writers and critics, and our food writers and critics can feel relevant now but also signal to our audience that after the COVID crisis, we’ll have different kinds of coverage that they will still need… We’re thinking very deeply about what are the things, the products, the tools that we can offer our audience and how can we bridge [new subscribers] from caring about the news in the time of the virus to caring about the news when things are going better.”
Steer people to products or platforms that will continue. Get your new visitors to subscribe to at least one ongoing thing—even if it has to be free. Newsletters are a great example. People tune in now because maybe they have more time or because they’re in front of the computer more or feel more isolated. But “If you can get them to subscribe to a newsletter, you have a way to reach them even when they go back to in-person offices and in-person meetings,” Gilbert said. Ragan turned much of their COVID coverage into a Crisis Leadership Board.
Know what about the relationship that feels important. “Why did the audience turn to you now so you could continue to make that valuable?” Gilbert asked. “Many of the people taking our subscription offers today are taking them on annual plan. So by April of next year, we would have had to make the case to them that their subscription is still valuable, even if we are in a happier, healthier position by then.”
Look at the specific COVID-19 coverage or resource that got the most clicks. How was it written? Was it a list? Did it have faces? For Williford, what is it about that one article that got 340,000 clicks, “How do we transition people?” Gilbert asked. “If you are one of the almost a million people who subscribed to our COVID-19 email newsletter, what are the other newsletters that may be valuable to you? What kinds of coverage did you click through from the email newsletter and how can we use those interactions with our site or native apps to get you to stay?”
Encourage new habits. “Find ways to deliver value, develop habits and remind subscribers about the value of the product,” said Michael Silberman, Piano’s SVP of strategy. “Even flat churn is impressive, given the big increase in new subscriptions during March.” Cancellations of monthly subscriptions acquired in March dropped an average of 17% compared to subscribers acquired in January and February, Piano estimated. Churn dropped by about 34% in Europe, whereas in the U.S. it was flat overall.
Understand what your audience needs. “And so if we can keep the needs of our audience at the forefront and not just think of our audience as consumers who buy our products but also people who need our news, we’re going to have a better experience,” Gilbert said.
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World Economic Outlook 2020-2021: The Great Lockdown

by Media

The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt the U.S and world economies a series of often unprecedented shocks—the “Great Lockdown” as economists refer to it, basically closed a wide range of sectors including travel, tourism and entertainment and many more, resulting in unemployment rates in the U.S. of more than 20 percent as of June 2020 and drastic revisions of worldwide economic growth for 2020 and 2021.

In a Connectiv/SIIA webinar on June 3, Chris Walker, Deputy Division Chief of the International Monetary Fund, offered an overview of how government and financial institutions are attempting to combat the crisis as well as economic forecasts for the U.S. and other advanced and emerging economies based on IMF research that can be found here.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the IMF had predicted the U.S. economy would grow at a rate of 2.3 percent in 2020—basically the same rate of growth for the last 10 years. Now, however, the IMF has dramatically revised its forecast, suggesting a drop of 5.9 percent for the U.S. and 7.5 percent for the Euro area this year.

“Anticipated drop per person worldwide is considered to be much sharper than during the 2009 financial crisis, which at the time was consider the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression,” said Walker. “That highlights the scale of what we are dealing with.”

Governments and financial institutions have also taken actions not seen since 2009 (and in many cases, exceeding those measures) in an effort to preserve economies, including paycheck protection, loans for small business and individual rebates, as well as the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates to nearly zero.

“If you consider the three packages passed by Congress, that’s an increase in spending of about $3 trillion or 3% of the total GDP,” said Walker. “The Fed has provided a huge amount of credit support to the corporate sector and even extended lending to municipalities. Interest on a 10-year bond is now well below 1%, something no one anticipated the U.S. would ever reach.”

A recovery path depends on several factors, most notably a resurgence of COVID-19 in the second half of 2020 and 2021. “Our initial estimate is that we will not have a V-shape recovery for advanced economies–it’s actually shaped more like a check-mark with a sharp drop followed by a more gradual recovery over time,” said Walker. “Most risks are to the downside, with the first downside scenario being the outbreak lasts longer than originally anticipated. That means that at the toughest point, growth will be 2% or 3% worse than what we forecast. For example, the forecast for the U.S. is minus 5.9% for 2020 but that could end up being a loss of 8%.”

On the bright side, neither the U.S. government nor world economic institutions have exhausted their means of support. “We can’t borrow indefinitely even at these rates and not expect to see repercussions,” said Walker. “However, we are far from limit of support that the government can provide. If you can issue debt at less than zero percent and it can be used to support economic activity, that is an opportunity.”